A Few Thought on The Uprising in Egypt

Well, inspired by the Tunisian example, the Egyptians are trying to riot their leader out of power. As with the Tunisians, I wish them absolute success, but I cannot state my optimism for this affair either.

To put it plainly, a revolution that simply throws someone out of power creates only a power vacuum, and in the face of such anarchy, even people of strong will and good intention are likely to accept the most stable government possible, even that of a dictator. Successful revolutionaries, such as those in my country, or in eighteenth century France, or twentieth century Russia, had or put some form of government in place to fight for. Cromwell's revolt and assorted civil wars in the third world lacked this structure, and they resulted only in dictatorships.

In some ways, establishing a shadow government or swearing loyalty to a Continental Congress, is simply the least test of a people's desire for change. Without genuinely organizing something to oppose oppression, they prove their lack of resolve to fight an oppressor able to inflict pain--and are there any other kinds? Furthermore, without anything to put in power at the end of the fight, the Egyptians and the Tunisians may find themselves with nothing but another single ruler, perhaps promising not to be a tyrant, but only perhaps.

Just a few thoughts....

A few thoughts on Social Security

Economics has rarely been the straightforward exchange of goods for money from the textbooks. A few abstractions, perhaps even white lies, come into play, and strangely,they actually tend to improve the economy and therefore social security.

Now, for the worth of a given company's stock to rise or fall without the introduction of a new service, product or procedure (i.e., without a change in the worth of the company), investors either have to judge those stocks exchange by some standard other than the worth of the issuing company or find some cheaper way to finance or process their purchase; and all of these things do seem to occur. Traders have bought on Credit, pre-sold crashing stocks and cyber-traded entirely worthless ones. Each of these actions has helped to raise the overall price of stocks, and each has drawn criticism for its believed role in a serious downturn. Even in the face of stern efforts to prevent such creative finance however, someone will invent some new system of something and bring the economy to new highs while risking very sudden lows, and, as the economy often follows the market for some reason, Gross American income will rise, taking the tax base and social security with it. Certainly given the twenty-five years till the expected S.S. blowout it will.

Of course, we'll still have the stock market to worry about, but that may be an unavoidable and perhaps ultimately desirable constant.

Just a few thoughts.

A few thoughts on Obama's Speech

Energy:  In some ways, Obama is like a bad-luck version of Capt. Kirk.  He at least seems to know that we have to get out from under imported oil, and, like the engineers on the Enterprise, he even seems to grasp the scientific strides needed to change our energy future.  Unfortunately though, he doesn't have Gene Roddenberry picking his scripts.  We will probably not be able to get cheap, clean fuel through any convenient means like reversing polarity, and unfortunately Obama may therefore end up in the uncomfortable position of asking his crew-mates for sacrifice without reward.

Education:  1)  Science and math are great, but the very communal nature of both of these things may result in our pissing away any advantages.  Scientists talk to scientists all over the world, so very few scientific secrets are going to stay all that damn secret.  2)  According to The Law of Comparative Advantage in economics, a person, company or nation best serve both their own needs and those of the world by pursuing their own best talent, even in the face of superior talents.  Given this, we may not want to try to build an economy on science and math--they may not, in fact still be out strongest suits, and more science and math education may limit us to only certain high-tech' markets.  3)  How 'bout teaching our kids a foreign language, too?  We live in a multi-ligual market and a bi-lingual country, after all.

An End to Tax Breaks for the Rich: Tax ease for the rich is not the same as tax ease for business. At any given time a given company has only an ungrowing fund of about two-weeks worth of its net income available to spend for anything unplanned. After establishing this fund, a business seems to be spending its entire income on payroll, expenses, taxes or pre-planned improvements, and each of these expenditures generates taxes, whether through the income taxes of wage earners and the sales tax on purchases as well as through any further companies receiving that money from the original source. People, however, neither spend nor save all of their money, and so, oddly, they generate fewer taxes, per-dollar, than even tax-free companies of equal income would through the taxes of its employees. In light of this fact then, a tax on the rich does not seem to be a greater burden on the economy than a tax on the middle- or lower-classes, and in light of this, an even tax certainly makes sense. Unfortunately, taxes will probably never be even. The rich will have more ways to invest and disqualify income simply by having more and better advisers, and lawmakers will have to be in a continuous search for means to overcome any tax loop-holes in use. I wish the President good luck in his stated attempt, but I also would like to suggest widening the number of investments exempt from tax to include any money banked for over a year. Banks lend dollars recorded to their funds for the ultimate deposit of at least a percentage of those dollars into the accounts of those receiving the funds. Those recipient banks then record those same dollars to their accounts, and through this hopefully benign fiction, the sum total amount of capital available for investment grows, and probably faster than through any percolation from the top.

Just a few thoughts.....

A Few thought on a new E.P.A.

Newt Gingrich wants to scrap the Environmental Protection Agency and replace it with The Environmental Solutions Agency, "incorporating the statutory responsibilities of the old EPA while making necessary statutory changes that will eliminate the job-killing regulatory abuses and power grabs of the old EPA." Gingrich wants the new E.S.A "dedicated to bringing together science, technology, entrepreneurs, incentives, and local creativity to create a cleaner environment through smarter regulation." The new ESA "will focus on developing actual solutions to environmental challenges rather than simply trying to litigate them into existence. The ESA will work with industry instead of dictating to industry and incentivize the use of newer technologies instead of punishing current businesses.

This all sounds great, of course. We all want bureaucrats to use the most accurate information possible when making their decisions, and we'd prefer them to use incentives rather than punishments. But why does this switch from the whip to the carrot require a new agency? Any bureaucracy, from the EPA to the NSA, ultimately answers to the President for its actions, even self-initiated one, and so the change of mission statement would require nothing more than a statement from the oval office. Creating a new organization, after all, may just leave new members of that organization struggling to define or understand their role--and does Gingrich want them doing that on the public payroll?

Worse, the use of government incentives would still be government control of business, even if through unusual means, and regardless of those means, we can largely expect economic problems. For one thing, any incentive for a business to clean itself will have to be large enough to increase the profits of any company enjoying them significantly. At some point though, the government will probably decide to withdraw those benefits, perhaps as part of a program to pay a deficit or line a congressional pocket, and this will still amount to an unplanned burden on that company. That company, then, will still have to kill jobs to survive--and any politician worth his snake oil will still be able to use this threat to pressure American business....

Just some thoughts....

Note: All quotes above are from Newt Gingrich's website http://www.newt.org/newt-direct/replacing-epa

A few thought on Lebanon

I'm not entirely worried about the election of Hezbollah leader Mohammed Kabbara in Lebanon. First of all, Lebanon is a actually a weak country politically, and she has often been in the hands of outsiders The Israelis even began referring to it as The Lebanese Morass after a vain attempt to find any political entity sufficiently atable to make either war or peace with. This new government then, like Lebanon's previous one, is simply the result of a foreign power strong enough to decide her internal politics. Previously the Syrians were in power, and now the Hezbollah is. A few years from now, the I.R.A. might give it a shot.

Yes, Kabbara is with a pro-Palestinian and therefore anti-Israeli and anti-western "army," and the CIA have even called him a terrorist. In the Middle East, though, organizations like that thrive in their abiity to claim moral outrage and victimhood, and an elected Kabbara will not be able to do that. Instead, he will have to prove himself more able to rule than the Israelis, and very few politicians ever manage that feat. Even The Great Communicator often suffered loss of approval and had to go negative on his supposed ideologic enemies.

Interestingly, Kabbara's placement in office may be a golden opportunity to caponize radical Islam. At some point, after all, someone else is going to want Lebanon and they just might fight Kabbara for it, openning a conflict inside the anti-western world.

Heck, the U.S. might even play smart by staying outside of it to prevent any possible foes from unifying in the face of our external threat. For once we could just let ourselves gain an advantage.

Just a thought....

A few thoughts on Iraq

THE TOP REASONS TO GIVE IRAQ TO KUWAIT: (It's an idea!)

1) They wanted to be together--Iraq even invaded once! Beyond that, hey, they and Iran used to be the same country (Persia), and they seem to see their disunion as the result of decisions by the hated colonial powers. Hell, they even refer to one feature in Iraq's borders as "Winston's Hiccup" and believe it to have been the result a a small bit of indigestion on the part of Churchill while he was drawing the map. The Iraqi's just might welcome such a merger.

2) Pursuant to #1, we could probably spin this to make ourselves seem like the benefactor or the power-broker of the Arab world and that might diffuse a suicide bomber or two.

3) Being an army of occupation is like being a policeman on the west side of Chicago and just ask a cop or a Crip about the futility of that.

4) Any post invasion government in Iraq will at least seem like an American puppet, but the established and respected regime in Kuwait may have no such problems.

5) Placing the progressive government of Kuwait over Iraq would be the de facto removal of tyranny which we might not be able to count on otherwise.

6) The Kuwaitis actually know how to govern a nation in the Middle East and to judge by the army attacks on police stations, we might not.

7) The Kuwaitis are rich enough to finance Iraq's war against Iran, so they probably have the money to arm and organize Iraq, even if they're small.

A few thoughts on the FBI's mafia crack-down

Unfortunately, merely decapitating the mob will do nothing. In the event of the death, imprisonment or retirement of a don or two, one or more newbies will just muscle their way over the deceased's turf.

The DEA even tacitly admits this through its policy of measuring its effectiveness in terms of elevations in the cost of illegal drugs, but this crackdown will, if anything, decrease the price of criminal commodities and services through increased competition between organizations for a part of newly cleared territories. Of course the breakdown of these monopolies of crime may leave business owners paying protection to more than one enforcer in the confusion and dispute over territories.

Well, we could take the one step most effective against any economic organization: a boycott, in this case one against vice, drugs and gambling. Almost no economic organization can stand up to pressure like that.

Of course, though, in that case, the challenge is on us.

Just some thoughts....

A few thoughts on Obama's new economic plan

AP - Under pressure to energize the economy, President Barack Obama will put job creation and American competitiveness at the center of his State of the Union address, promoting spending on education and research while pledging to trim the nation's soaring debt.

...And Obama may have been in better political shape pushing the now defunct (or at least "funct" over) health care program. At least that could justify itself, in spite of any inevitable waste or corruption, on a moral need. Building and economy, however, does inevitably involve a lot of rich types partying at the country club and extending a lot of expensive hospitality to merely possible customers. People already object to the banks' apparently premature spreading of wealth, and such savings institutions are the greatest cause for growth in investment captial.

Worse, with his health care program untested and this an obvious opportunity for media complaint, Obama may end up, in the public mind at least, as a two-time loser in spite of having only one program in place and that one being economic and therefore ambiguous in its end result.

Oddly though, to grow the economy, Obama may just want to bail out the banks again. Of course they're not in trouble currently, but that's not important. Active banking will increase the amount of investment capital available through a process of re-saving. Essentially, two-thirds of every dollar in every bank goes into some investment somewhere and ultimately ends up in the paychecks of the end-recipients on those projects. At least some of those recipients then save at least some of that money, and that point the banks receiving it record that income as part of their investment capital in spite of its presence on the records of the first bank as well. Through this necessary white lie of finance, the total number of dollars available for investment then grows, but in response to the needs of the market rather than any government guess about future markets.

Just a few thoughts.....

A few thoughts of U.S. trade with China

The U.S. probably cannot escape trade with China. These days, the process of making anything requiring more than on step to manufacture almost invariably crosses at least one nation's border, and usually more than one. Given the sheer cheapness of Chinese labor and currency then, some manufacturer somewhere will, at any given time, be buying parts or services from China, and Americans will be buying the end results.

Any law attempting to prevent such trans-national transactions will be a fiction. Foreign manufacturers supplying American ones with parts or services will, after all, have a legitimate right to use Chinese suppliers, and even in the face of such a law against trade with China, they would only have to purchase such things through a third party to grant themselves plausible deniability on location of supply. In light of this problem then we might as well grant ourselves access to that reserve of cheap resources and at least one non-military means to threaten the Chinese in times of conflict: embargo in its many, many forms.

Admittedly, Trade with China will be a little scary. As the world's largest economy under one decision-making body and a communist state with at least an ideological desire to hinder the U.S. and capitalism, China just might have at least some desire to harm the American economy. To do that in any greater way than currently, however, China would have to supply a controlling percentage of U.S. imports at prices too low for other suppliers to compete, and to deal with such a threat, we simply have to keep other trade partners such as Japan and The European Union in our economic little black book for use in the event of being monetarily "stood up." Without such a problem though, the added competition may ultimately give us better and cheaper goods from both the Chinese and our current trade partners.

Just a few thoughts....

A few thoughts on gay marriage

Almost all discussion of gay marriage has been on moral grounds--the rightness or wrongness of a union between two members of the same sex, whether considered in religious or secular terms. Unfortunately, I'm not a very good moralist, and so I'd like to present a somewhat more practical view: in my opinion, forcing gay unions into the same legal status as heterosexual ones is probably going to complicate matters such as entitlement, divorce, alimony and custody fantastically. To share a few of the possibilities:

1) Adultery is a grounds for divorce in both civil and canon law, but many gay couples do seek another member to their relationship to reproduce. Therefore, either courts will have to change the accepted definition of adultery to accommodate this practice, or gay couples will have to forgo the possibility of parenthood during any marriage. The first possibility may very well leave philanderers of either orientation able to exploit this new definition for their own purposes, but the second will certainly come under fire from gay-rights groups.

2) Alimony decisions may be arbitrary, but they are predictable. As a rule, without clinching evidence to the contrary the court will define any wife as a homemaker and grants her restitution. Defining one party of a same-sex marriage as the homemaker and the other as the breadwinner, however, will, almost undoubtedly, require a more random and arbitrary ruling. Expect a certain amount of injustice and confusion to result.

3) The very need to introduce another person into a gay marriage in order to have children will force courts to judge the parental rights of three people, one with only a step-relationship to the child and another without a marital relationship to anyone. Asserting the rights of either of these parties will set precedent affecting persons with similar relationships to the children of heterosexual marriages, and, obviously, at least some marital partners, sperm-donors or womb-renters are going to address the court over perceived and even real injustices.

In all, the legalization of gay marriage seems likely to put both heterosexuals and gays into a deeper legal mire, and in light of this, those in homosexual relationships may simply want to define themselves as the legal equivalent of a purchasing co-operative. In a sense, they are indeed that, and the sheer simplicity of that idea would present American law with a more copable set of questions.

Just a few thoughts.....